Like this:

RT launches ‘Chronicles’, featuring the most dramatic and important uncut footage from each month or news event in long form. This month its a ‘no comment’ raw video compilation from Ukraine taken throughout May 2014.

As the US, EU and Britain huff and puff in barrel loads of clichés: “red lines” are “crossed”, “sovereignty and territorial integrity” has been “violated”, they stand “shoulder to shoulder” with their shoe-horned in fascist government in Ukraine, they are “resolute” against “Russian aggression”, and will not “stand idly by”, sanity seems in short supply.

Ukrainian President Oleksandr Turchynov warned that his country would take “appropriate measures” if Rear Admiral Sergei Haiduk and others are not released.

“If by 21:00 (local time) all provocations against Ukrainian troops are not ceased, and Admiral Haiduk and all other hostages, civilian and military, are not freed, the authorities will take appropriate measures,” Turchynov said…

Russia has finalized the legal process of taking Crimea under its sovereignty, as President Putin signed a law amending the Russian constitution to reflect the transition – READ MORE http://on.rt.com/lc4fnx

When will the Killing War in Iran Begin? It Already Has

“Economic sanctions are, at their core, a war against public health.” –The New England Journal of Medicine [1]

While campaigns are organized to deter the United States and Israel from acting on threats to launch an air war against Iran, both countries, in league with the European Union (winner of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize) carry on a low-intensity war against Iran that is likely to be causing more human suffering and death than strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities would. This is a war against public health, aimed at the most vulnerable: cancer patients, hemophiliacs, kidney dialysis patients, and those awaiting transplants. Its victims are unseen, dying anonymously in hospitals, not incinerated in spectacular explosions touched off by cruise missiles and bunker buster bombs. But ordinary Iranians who can’t get needed medications are every bit as much victims of war as those blown apart by bombs. And yet, we think, that as long as the bombs don’t rain down, that peace has been preserved. Perhaps it has, in formal terms, but bleeding to death in the crater of a bomb, or bleeding to death because you can’t get hemophilia drugs, is, in either case, death.

In Iran today there is an acute shortage of pharmaceuticals for kidney dialysis and transplants and for treating cancer, hemophilia, thalessemia, multiple sclerosis, and other disorders. Hospital equipment is breaking down for want of spare parts. And raw materials used by domestic pharmaceutical manufacturers—blocked by Western sanctions—are in short supply. It adds up to a healthcare crisis. The United States and European Union say their sanctions don’t apply to drugs and medical equipment, but US and European banks are unwilling to handle financial transactions with Iran. If they do, the US Treasury Department will deny them access to the US banking system. Since isolation from the world’s largest economy would guarantee their demise, banks comply and shun Iran. As a consequence, few goods from the West make their way into the country, the exemptions for drugs and medical equipment being nothing more than a public relations ruse to disguise the barbarity of the sanctions. Not that Washington is denying that its sanctions are hurting ordinary Iranians. It’s just that responsibility for their consequences is denied. US president Barak Obama “has said the Iranian people should blame their own leaders.” [2] For what—failing to knuckle under?

“In contrast to war’s easily observable casualties, the apparently nonviolent consequences of economic intervention seem like an acceptable alternative. However…economic sanctions can seriously harm the health of persons who live in targeted nations.” [3] This has been well established and widely accepted in the cases of Iraq in the 1990s and the ongoing US blockade of Cuba. Political scientists John Mueller and Karl Mueller wrote an important paper in Foreign Affairs, in which they showed that economic sanctions “may have contributed to more deaths during the post-Cold War era than all weapons of mass destruction throughout history.” [4]

“The dangers posed today by such enfeebled, impoverished, and friendless states as Iraq and North Korea are minor indeed”, they wrote in 1999. It might be added that the dangers posed by Iran to the physical safety of US citizens are not only minor but infinitesimally small. Notwithstanding the fevered fantasies of rightwing commentators, Iran has neither the means, nor the required death wish, to strike the United States. Nor Israel, which has the means—an arsenal of 200 nuclear weapons—to wipe Iran off the face of the earth. However, the danger the country poses to the idea of US domination – and hence, to the banks, corporations, and major investors who dominate US policy-making – are admittedly somewhat greater.

“Severe economic sanctions”, the Muellers contend, ought to be “designated by the older label of ‘economic warfare’”. “In past wars economic embargoes caused huge numbers of deaths. Some 750,000 German civilians may have died because of the Allied naval blockade during World War I.” [5]

“So long as they can coordinate their efforts,” the two political scientists continue, “the big countries have at their disposal a credible, inexpensive and potent weapon for use against small and medium-sized foes. The dominant powers have shown that they can inflict enormous pain at remarkably little cost to themselves or the global economy. Indeed, in a matter of months or years whole economies can be devastated…” [6] And with devastated economies, come crumbling healthcare systems and failure to provide for the basic healthcare rights of the population.

We might ask, then, why the United States and European Union, practitioners of economic warfare against Iran, are bent on destroying Iran’s economy, along with its public health system. “Sanctions,” New York Times’ reporter Rick Gladstone writes, have subjected “ordinary Iranians” to “increased deprivations” in order to “punish Iran for enriching uranium that the West suspects is a cover for developing the ability to make nuclear weapons.” [7] In other words, Iran is suspected of having a secret nuclear weapons program, and so must be sanctioned to force it to abandon it.

Contrary to Gladstone, the West doesn’t really believe that Tehran has a secret nuclear weapons program, yet even if we accept it does believe this, the position is indefensible. Why should Iranians be punished for developing a capability that the countries that have imposed sanctions already have?

The reason why, it will be said, is because Iranians are bent on developing nuclear weapons to destroy Israel. Didn’t Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threaten to “wipe Israel off the map”?

Regurgitated regularly by US hawks and Israeli politicians to mobilize support for the bombing of Iran, the claim is demagogic rubbish. Ahmadinejad predicted that Israel as a Zionist state would someday disappear much as South Africa as an apartheid state did. He didn’t threaten the physical destruction of Israel and expressed only the wish that historic Palestine would become a multinational democratic state of Arabs and the Jews whose ancestors arrived in Palestine before Zionist settlers. [8]

No less damaging to the argument that Iranians aspire to take Israel out in a hail of nuclear missiles is the reality that it would take decades for Iran to match Israel’s already formidable nuclear arsenal, if indeed it aspires to. For the foreseeable future, Israel is in a far better position to wipe Iran off the map. And given Israel’s penchant for flexing its US-built military muscle, is far more likely to be the wiper than wipee. Already it has almost wiped an entire people from the map of historic Palestine.

But this is irrelevant, for the premise that the West suspects Iran of developing a nuclear weapons capability is false. To be sure, the mass media endlessly recycle the fiction that the West suspects Iran’s uranium enrichment program is a cover for a nuclear weapons program, but who in the West suspects this? Not high officials of the US state, for they have repeatedly said that there’s no evidence that Iran has a secret nuclear weapons program.

The consensus view of the United States’ 16 intelligence agencies is that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program years ago. Director of US intelligence James Clapper “said there was no evidence that (Iran) had made a decision on making a concerted push to build a weapon. David H. Petraeus, the C.I.A. director, concurred with that view…. Other senior United States officials, including Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta and Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have made similar statements.” [9]

Rather than weakening this conclusion, stepped up US espionage has buttressed it. Iran’s leaders “have opted for now against…designing a nuclear warhead,” said one former intelligence official briefed on US intelligence findings. “It isn’t the absence of evidence, it’s the evidence of an absence. Certain things are not being done” [10] that would indicate that Iran is working on nuclear weapons. Even Mossad, Israeli’s intelligence agency “does not disagree with the US on the weapons program,” according to a former senior US intelligence official. [11]

So, contrary to the claim that the West “suspects” Iran of concealing a nuclear weapons program, no one in a position of authority in the US state believes this to be true. Neither does Israeli intelligence. Why, then, is the United States and its allies subjecting ordinary Iranians to increased deprivations through sanctions?

The answer, according to Henry Kissinger, is because US policy in the Middle East for the last half century has been aimed at “preventing any power in the region from emerging as a hegemon.” This is another way of saying that the aim of US Middle East policy is to stop any Middle Eastern country from challenging its domination by the United States. Iran, Kissinger points out, has emerged as the principal challenger. [12]

Indeed, it did so as long ago as 1979, when the local extension of US power in Iran, the Shah, was overthrown, and the country set out on a path of independent economic and political development. For the revolutionaries’ boldness in asserting their sovereignty, Washington pressed Saddam Hussein’s Iraq into a war with Iran. This served the same purpose as today’s economic warfare, sabotage, threats of military intervention, and assassinations of Iran’s nuclear scientists: to weaken the country and stifle its development; to prevent it from thriving and thereby becoming an example to other countries of development possibilities outside US domination.

Uranium enrichment has emerged as point of conflict for two reasons.

First, a civilian nuclear power industry strengthens Iran economically and domestic uranium enrichment provides the country with an independent source of nuclear fuel. Were Iran to depend on the West for enriched uranium to power its reactors, it would be forever at the mercy of a hostile US state. Likewise, concern over energy security being in the hands of an outside power has led Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam and South Korea to insist over US objections that they be allowed to produce nuclear fuel domestically, without sanction. With US nuclear reactor sales hanging in the balance, it appears that their wishes will be respected. [13] Iran will be uniquely denied.

Secondly, uranium enrichment provides Tehran with the capability of developing nuclear weapons quickly, if it should ever feel compelled to. Given Washington’s longstanding hostility to an independent Iran, there are good reasons why the country may want to strengthen its means of self-defense. The hypocrisy of the United States championing counter-proliferation—and only selectively since no one is asking Israel to give up its nuclear weapons, and the United States hasn’t the slightest intention of ever relinquishing its own—reveals the illegitimacy of the exercise.

The reason, then, for waging war on Iran’s public health, a war that intensifies the suffering of the sick and kills cancer, kidney dialysis and other patients, is not because their government has a secret nuclear weapons program —which no one in the US intelligence community believes anyway—but because a developing Iran with independent energy, economic and foreign policies threatens Washington’s preferred world political order—one in which the United States has unchallenged primacy. Primacy is sought, not to satisfy ambitions for power for power’s sake, or to provide ordinary US citizens with economic opportunities at home, or to protect them from dangers that originate abroad, but to secure benefits for the plutocrats who dominate US public policy. The benefits uniquely accrue to plutocrats: opportunities to squeeze more for themselves from our labor, our land, and our resources and from those of our brethren abroad—the 99% in other lands, with whom we’re linked by a common economic position and interests. If the plutocrats and their loyal political servants in Washington and Brussels have to kill numberless Iranians to secure these benefits, they will. And are.

Notes

1. Eisenberg L, “The sleep of reason produces monsters—human costs of economic sanctions,” New England Journal of Medicine, 1997; 336:1248-50.
2. Thomas Erdbrink, “Iran sanctions take unexpected toll on medical imports”, The New York times, November 2, 2012; Najmeh Bozorgmehr, “In Iran, sanctions take toll on the sick”, The Washington Post, September 4, 2012
3. Karine Morin and Steven H. Miles, “Position paper: The health effects of economic sanctions and embargoes: The role of health professionals”, Annals of Internal Medicine, Volume 132, Number 2, 18 January 2000.
4. John Mueller and Karl Mueller, “Sanctions of mass destruction”, Foreign Affairs, Volume 78, Number 3, May/June 1999.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Rick Gladstone, “Iranian President Says Oil Embargo Won’t Hurt”, The New York Times, April 10, 2012.
8. Glenn Kessler, “Did Ahmadinejad really say Israel should be ‘wiped off the map’?” The Washington Post, October 6, 2011.
9. James Risen and Mark Mazzetti, “U.S. agencies see no move by Iran to build a bomb”, The New York Times, February 24, 2012.
10. Joby Warrick and Greg Miller, “U.S. intelligence gains in Iran seen as boost to confidence”, The Washington Post, April 7, 2012.
11. James Risen, “U.S. faces a tricky task in assessment of data on Iran”, The New York Times, March 17, 2012.
12. Henry A. Kissinger, “A new doctrine of intervention?” The Washington Post, March 30, 2012.
13. Carol E. Lee and Jay Solomon, “Obama to discuss North Korea, Iran”, The Wall Street Journal, March 21, 2012.

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Ahmad Iskef, head, or let’s say former head of the Al Qaeda “Bayanon Martyrs Brigade” threatening to kill the head of Syrian Air Force Intelligence Branch in Aleppo after shelling the residential buildings around it with artillery

Second day he’s been sent to his 72 male virgins in hell, by the men of God, the brave Syrian Arab Army soldiers, while attacking a Syrian Army checkpoint with his foreign sponsored FSA thugs

Patrick Clawson of the influential neo-con Washington Institute for Near East Studies OPENLY suggests that the US should provoke Iran into taking the first shot.Israel Lobbyist suggests False Flag attack to start war with Iran. Just like 911 in New York causing the deaths of American civilians and soldiers, a million dead Iraqis and for what?

War surgeon and co-founder of “Doctors without Borders”, Jacques Bérès, tells his experience treating injured Jihadists in Aleppo, Syria, among them French terrorists who want to “emulate Al Qaeda terrorist, Mohamed Merah.”

The people of Rableh, a village situated between the Lebanese border and the city of Qusayr, in the Province of Homs, are protesting the kidnapping

We are talking about workers and farmers, men, youth and women, who were just a few kilometres from the village, working in the fields for the apple harvest, a major source of livelihood for the local population. Abou Fadel, a Catholic and father of one of the victims, contacted by Fides news agency, said he heard gunfire and blasts, “so we went to see what was happening. We saw lots of vans and pick-ups that brought people away. In the fields there were only boxes with the apple harvest left.”

Abou Fadel reports that “this region has for months been completely under the control of armed gangs who boss around. In the past few weeks we could not take care…

“On Psywar against the Innocent”

When freedom of expression is used to incite the public to hatred of a national, religious, racial or ethnic group it becomes a crime. According to Article 20 of the U.N.’s “International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights” :

1. Any propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law.

2. Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law.

This doesn’t contradict rights of freedom of expression. It attempts to constrain agendas of hatred. It is possible that any program of military propaganda or psywar against groups or nations is fundamentally illegal. Attempts to defend extreme hate crimes as within our rights of free speech encourages censorship, which encourages repression.

A video of U.S. origin, “Innocence of Muslims,” the trailer to a film defaming and sexually deriding the Prohet Mohammed, has of course resulted in protest by Muslims worldwide. Why isn’t everyone protesting ? The trailer is intensively offensive to human values, lacks redeeming artistic merit, and is recognizably propaganda. In California a judge refused to ban “Innocence of Muslims” from youtube, on the grounds that suppression would violate U.S. guarantees of free speech.

In France Charlie Hebdo has published on its cover a cartoon caricature depicting Islam’s Prophet naked in a distorted sexual posture. The effect is despicable and intended. The original issue sold out and despite the anxiety of the country’s 4 million Muslims, Charlie Hebdo ran the cartoon again. While France is sensitive to religious laws (abortions don’t appear in French literature), it hasn’t charged the editors of Charlie Hebdo with a hate crime, and instead closed French embassies and schools in twenty countries. Domestically any protests against the Charlie Hebdo cartoon, or against the American video/film, are banned. In Germany there are debates about whether the film should be allowed at cinemas or not.

To step back in history: in 2005 a cartoon of the Prophet by a Dutch cartoonist caused global protest by Muslims. The effect of his cartoon was compounded by selection of Islamic countries as NATO’s preferred military targets as well as the occupation of Iraq. Internationally the humour of blasphemous cartoons is lost on people who live by their religions, particularly when their co-religionists are slaughtered for profit.

Europe can’t be considered unwitting in the uses of cartoons as weaponry. Starting in about 1934 a campaign of cartoons attacking Judaism became a singularly Nazi tool in propaganda programs which became extermination programs. A similarity compounds in that both the U.S. video and the French cartoon are semi-pornographic in deriding their target sexually. Sexual derision as propaganda was introduced to the world by Julius Streicher, editor of Der Stuermer, the Nazi organ which published cartoons of Jews defined to caricature. A note from The Black Book, originally compiled by the Soviet Union’s Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee starting in 1942:

For the first time in history, pornography was made an instrument of national education when Julius Streicher became editor of Der Stuermer and head of the publishing house Stuermer Verlag. Streicher, governor of Franconia, publicly honored by Hitler, was charged with the task of turnng men in swine. Sadism and morbid sexual suggestions were the means. No under-the-counter sales were made of his perversely sensational literature, but rather by advertising and even by edict was it disseminated throughout Germany….Der Stuermer claims that the Jewish religion by its laws imposes sexual crimes on its believers.”

The video trailer of “Innocence of Muslims” strums these chords. In every country of the world, Muslims have the courge to protest the ugliness. Aside from being a blasphemy within Islam, the singular derision of the Prophet extends to the entire religious group. It isn’t only propaganda but hate propaganda, and the occasional violence of the response a measure of the propaganda’s damage and effectiveness.

“Innocence of Muslims” has its predecessor in the film Fitna made by Netherlands MP Geert Wilders, who rose to a seat in Dutch Parliament by increasing Islamophobia and gathering its support. In February 2009 Wilders showed the film to members of the U.S. Congress. In Canada as the Conservative government contributed to the illegal bombing of Libya, Mr. Wilders shared his opinion of Mohammed on May 9th, 2011 in Toronto, then on May 10 from Ottawa’s National Arts Center. Although Wilders was acquitted of hate speech in the Netherlands, moments of his warnings against Islamizaton are provocative deep insults. Canada’s laws against hate speech were not applied and he was given police protection. When the banner of freedom of speech yields a serious hate crime, repeatedly without prosecution, the campaign is sanctioned by the State.

Citizens of Western nations where ‘sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me,’ are slow to realize the sensitivity of Islam to symbolism, if not somewhat numb to religion in general. In the 1980′s Islamic fundamentalist threats against Salmon Rushdie may have seemed a ridiculous response to his manner of questioning authority. After strong warnings, his “Satanic Verses” was used in a worldwide marketing campaign with predictable results. Some indication of an agitprop campaign was there in the effective marshalling of England’s and North American literary communities to Rushdie’s defense, in a “which side are you on” equation useful to warriors, less so to intellectuals. The rise of Islamophobia inerfaces neatly with U.S. and Coaliton bombing of Iraq in 1990-91, and the subsequent military policies against Islamic nations. The defense of Rushdie’s literary merit and rights, was followed by the demonization of Saddam Hussein and five Hiroshima’s worth of ordinance dropped on a Muslim culture in 1990 and 91, initial steps in the destruction of Iraq’s national group, museums, culture, people.

Because in 2012, the U.S. and France refuse to assert domestic laws against hate crimes in response to ongoing violations of Muslims’ civil, religions and political rights, the propaganda continues with State sanction. In France, the government’s responses to Hebdo and the anti-Islamic film contribute to isolating Muslims from their national fabric. It has the same effect as adopting anti-burqa legislation. In North America the ongoing extreme abuses of Islamic culture, both through crimes of foreign policy, but more immediately in the military’s and legal system’s treatment of individual Muslims, are normalized. The appearance of widely publicized hate crimes, masquerading as the flux of free expression, warns one as a prelude to another step in another illegal war targeting hundreds of thousand of innocent civilians.

When we speak of Hitler’s “War against the Jews,” we are using a figure of speech. It was a war against unarmed men, against women and children, carried on by an army of many millions of highly expert soldiers using all the destructive techniques of modern military science… – The Black Book

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“War on Iran Will Trigger World War III”

“Our defensive power has been created on the basis of our defensive strategy and the presumption ruling our defensive strategy is that we will enter an massive battle with a US-led coalition.” Brigadier General Hossein Salami, IRGC Deputy Commander, September 2012)

* * *

Both the US and Israel have threatened to implement a preemptive first strike attack against Iran, the consequences of which would be devastating.

Responding to these ongoing threats, Iran’s Commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) General Amir Ali Hajizadeh has warned that a US-Israeli military attack against Iran could lead to the outbreak of a Third World War. He also intimated that Israel cannot launch a war without the green-light from the US.

If such a war were to be launched, according to General Hajizadeh, a scenario of uncontrolled military escalation is likely to occur. If attacked, Iran would retaliate against both Israeli and US targets including US military facilities in neighboring countries (ie. Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Gulf States):

Commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Aerospace Force General Amir Ali Hajizadeh warned the US and the Zionist regime [Israel] that an attack on Iran will likely trigger World War III.

Speaking to the Arabic news network, Al-Alam on Sunday, General Hajizadeh said the US and the Israeli regime may not enter war with Iran “independent from each other, meaning that either one of these two starts the war, it will be joined by the other one”.

“We see the US and the Zionist regime standing fully on the side of each other and we cannot imagine the Zionist regime initiating a war without the US backup. Due to the same reason, if a war breaks out, we will definitely wage battle on both sides and will definitely be engaged with the US bases,” he said.

“In case such conditions arise, a series of incidents will take place which will not be controllable and manageable and such a war might turn into a third world war. That means, certain countries may enter the war for or against Iran,” added the general.

The IRGC commander warned that in case such war is waged on Iran, the US bases in “those countries around us and inside the neighboring countries will be targeted and they will even be threatened by the nations of these very states”. (Fars News Agency, September 23, 2012, emphasis added)

The World is at a dangerous crossroads. The statement of General Hajizadeh must be taken seriously.

Active war preparations against Iran have been ongoing for the last eight years. Since 2005, the US and its allies, including America’s NATO partners and Israel, have been involved in the extensive deployment and stockpiling of advanced weapons systems. The air defense systems of the US, NATO member countries and Israel are fully integrated. Israel cannot act without the support of its allies.

This is a coordinated endeavor of the Pentagon, NATO and Israel’s Defense Force (IDF) directed against Iran. Several non-NATO partner countries including the frontline Arab states (members of NATO’s Mediterranean Dialogue and the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative) are also involved.

Media Disinformation

Public opinion, swayed by media hype is tacitly supportive, indifferent or ignorant as to the likely impacts of what is upheld as an ad hoc “punitive” operation directed against Iran’s nuclear facilities rather than an all out war.

The war on Iran is presented to public opinion as an issue among others. It is not viewed as a threat to humanity. Quite the opposite: it is viewed as a humanitarian endeavor.

Retaliation

The Western media is beating the drums of war. The purpose is to tacitly instil, through repeated media reports, ad nauseam, within people’s inner consciousness, the notion that the Iranian threat is real and that the Islamic Republic should be “taken out”.

Iran has significant military capabilities. The fact that an attack on Iran could lead to retaliation and escalation which could potentially unleash a “global war” is not a matter of concern.

While the Islamic Republic does not constitute a threat to the security of Israel, Iran’s military brass has emphasized that in the case of an attack on Iran, retaliation against Israel is contemplated, with potentially devastating consequences:

On Saturday, IRGC’s top Commander Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari said an enemy invasion of Iran is possible, but such a war would put an end to the life of the Zionist regime of Israel.

….

“War may break out, but if Zionists [Israeli government] start something, that will be the point of their annihilation and the endpoint of their story,” he added.

Jafari, meantime, underlined that “no one dares to wage an extensive ground assault on Iran”.

The General said if the enemy were wise, there wouldn’t be any problem, “but the problem is that there is no guarantee for this rationality and we should be prepared too.

Later yesterday, his deputy, Brigadier General Hossein Salami, cautioned that any possible attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran by the Zionist regime would provide an opportunity for Tehran to wipe the regime off the earth.

“If the Zionists embark on attacking Iran, it will provide a historical opportunity for the Islamic Revolution to wipe them off the world’s geographical history,” Salami said on Saturday night on the state-run TV.

“We are now through with concerns about the Zionist regime’s threats,” he said, adding that Israel has bitter memories of its last-decade wars with the regional allies of the Islamic Republic, including Hezbollah and Hamas Movement.

“(Given the above-mentioned failures) how does it (the Zionist regime) want to be a threat against the Islamic Republic of Iran?” Salami asked.

He, meantime, underlined Iran’s preparedness to confront any aggression against the country, and said, “Our defensive power has been created on the basis of our defensive strategy and the presumption ruling our defensive strategy is that we will enter an massive battle with a US-led coalition.”

On Friday, Chief of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces Major General Seyed Hassan Firouzabadi also warned that Tehran would reciprocate any aggression against the country with an “immediate” and “non-stop” response, stressed.

“We do not feel threatened by the boastful remarks of Zionist leaders, because they are creatures with deep fright who continue crying out since they know that Iran’s response to threats will be readymade, immediate and non-stop,” Major General Firouzabadi told reporters on the sidelines of September 21 military parades marking the anniversary of the Week of Sacred Defense here in Tehran on Friday morning.

“The Zionist regime officials have declared in their (military) estimates that military operations against Iran neither can be done by Israel nor is useful for them,” he added.

He also stated that Iran’s armed forces today are unpredictable and their strategy and actions cannot be foreseen by the enemies.

The Sacred Defense Week, commemorating Iranians’ sacrifices during the 8 years of Iraqi imposed war on Iran in 1980s, started on Friday with nationwide parades by various units of the Islamic Republic Army, Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) and Basij (volunteer) forces in Southern Tehran. (Fars News Agency, September 23, 2012, emphasis added)

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After British Foreign Secretary William Hague presented another breathtaking litany of distortions and untruths at the United Nations regarding Syria, Halpin laid them out for his MP, Melvin “Mel” Stride, representing the Conservative government for Central Devon, demanding answers from Mr Hague’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO.).
– Felicity Arbuthnot

*****

I have just read a transcript of Mr Hague’s speech at the UN.

It is fair to say that every sentence is a lie or a distortion. A few examples of many:-

“We have not turned the desire for peace …” – Nothing could be further from the truth. HMG has provided funds, communication equipment and political support to a ragtag of armed bands. To that they have added sanctions, which are of dubious legality.

September 23, 2012– JORDAN – The armed forces of Syria and Jordan clashed Saturday after Syria fired into Jordanian territory, where thousands of refugees have fled from an 18-month-long civil war between the Bashar Assad regime and opposition fighters. According to a report by Al Jazeera, the Syrian army has moved its Unit 61 brigade — whose main function is to block any possible attack from Israel — from the Golan Heights to the Jordanian border. In recent months, attacks by the Syrian military on the border region with Jordan have intensified, as part of an effort to stem the flow of refugees into the neighboring kingdom. Syrian activists said rebels and government troops fought a fierce battle in the area, that lasted for several hours, overnight Friday. The activists said the fighting in and around the Syrian border town of Nasib continued until dawn Saturday. The Britain-based Syrian…

The Syrian foreign ministry says Turkey has opened its borders and airports for Syria-bound terrorists, calling it a flagrant violation of the international law.

The ministry made the remarks on Sunday in two letters addressed to the UN Security Council and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Syrian news agency Sana reported.

The ministry said Syria’s northern neighbor allowed “thousands of al-Qaeda, Takfiri, and Wahhabi terrorists” to cross the border in order to “kill innocent Syrians, blow up their properties, and spread chaos and destruction.”

Turkey is home to the headquarters of the self-proclaimed Free Syrian Army and hosts many meetings of foreign-backed insurgent groups fighting against Damascus.